Dari

Dari is the first language of an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 persons living in and around the cities of Yazd and Kerman in central Iran. While Dari is spoken in a geographical area that is predominantly Muslim, it is the ethnolect of the area’s Zoroastrians, followers of the pre-Islamic religion of Iran. Genetically, Dari is a member of the Northwestern Iranian language subfamily, which includes several other closely related languages, e.g. Kurdish, Gilaki, Balochi. The Northwestern Iranian languages themselves comprise a branch of the larger Iranian language family, which embraces in its Southwestern subgrouping the family’s best-known language, Persian. More distantly, Dari is related to European languages like English, German and French since the Iranian language group is itself a branch of the Indo-European language family.